Books: The Mist in Brownsville

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TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE by Gerald Green. 305 pages. Trident. $5.95.

Memory is a subtle liar and often a bad writer of fiction—but it can be a marvelous storyteller. Very early in this rush of remembrance of a Brooklyn boyhood 30 years ago, it is clear that Gerald Green has let memory do all the work. His hero, Albert Abrams, is a skinny, precocious, unheroic kid who tags fearfully after a gang of asphalt Iroquois called the Raiders. The book follows Albert and his heroes—a splendidly underprivileged crew of dirty-cut young men—through a wild summer day in the Brownsville streets. The action begins with the formal curbside cremation of a dog's carcass—very satisfying to Albert, an Ironist—and ends with a terrifying game of ringalevio, or tag, Albert's first fist fight, and a brisk one-alarm fire.

A troublesome oddity is that although all of this fine rowdyism is described from the viewpoint of the twelve-year-old Albert, a mist of ruefulness and loss drifts across the narrative. Even when Albert has blundered beyond the streets controlled by Catholic and Jewish slum-runners into a schoolyard held by Negroes and seems about to have his gizzard sliced, the tone is one of marveling reminiscence, not fright. Albert's perceptions are never solidly those of a twelve-year-old apprentice delinquent; often they are those of a 45-year-old writer. "Whistling, he bounced into Benny's narrow store," Green writes. "It always reminded Albert of a ship. The floor sloped. Great sacks of dried rice, beans, meal, were the stores of a Joseph Conrad merchantman, not a local grocery." No twelve-year-old thinks that way, not even a clever one who reads Conrad.

Author Green, who wrote the bestselling The Last Angry Man, should be far too expert to make such mistakes in a novel—but To Brooklyn with Love is not really a novel, since the author does not seem to control the recollections that sweep him along. It is a superb memoir indifferently disguised as fiction. If Albert the world's worst punchball player did not actually become Gerald the novelist, at very least they must have shared Brownsville in the 1930s. The reader sees this after 20 pages of irritation, and the awkward pretense of fiction no longer matters. The book, with all its misty ruefulness, is enormously likable.

One of its attractions is Albert's father. Sol Abrams is an aging doctor, bitter, brilliant, physically powerful, with a face like a Cherokee's—in fact, line for line the same corrosive old Olympian who dominated The Last Angry Man. It is a pleasure to hear him roar at the world again, even if the neighborhood has gone downhill and even if he knocks Green's memoir slightly out of shape.